Abstract
In a recent review, Vyas et al. commented on our previous observations regarding the presence of response sequences in the activity of cortical neuronal population and the contribution of such sequences to rotational dynamics patterns revealed with jPCA. Vyas et al. suggested that rotations generated from sequence-like responses are different from the ones arising from empirical neuronal patterns, which are highly heterogeneous across motor conditions in terms of response timing and shape. Here we clarify our previous findings and present new results showing that empirical population data contain plentiful neuronal responses whose temporal structure persists across conditions. The more complex, heterogeneous responses also contain temporal structure that persists within clusters of conditions. Both consistent and heterogeneous responses contribute to rotational dynamics; therefore, these contributions should be considered when interpreting population rotations. Overall, we do not see any principal contradiction between the neural population dynamics framework and our results pertaining to sequence-like responses. Yet, questions remain regarding the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis of low-dimensional representations of neuronal population data.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.